Compared to existing on-line democracy tools, KuneAgi differentiates itself by:
- a collective and deliberative dimension in the drafting of texts. Instead of having isolated individuals writing proposals in parallel, these individuals cooperate in a dedicated Working Group. This Working Group mobilises fully democratic procedures to deliver a text taking into account the technical competencies, the political values and the legitimate interests of all of its participants
- an orientation towards concrete public policy proposals, including the necessity to define priorities.
Several organisations and public authorities set up on-line public consultations of citizens: among many examples, in France, the centre-right political party UMP (EPP group in the European Parliament) launched the "Créateurs de possibles" website, in Germany, the city of Frankfurt discussed its concept for the integration of migrants, while the Ministry for Environment planned its sustainability strategy. These consultations are based upon on-line democracy tools such as DemocracyOS.
The general framework of this form of e-participation is the following. Each individual participant has the right to present an initiative or a proposal in the form of a short text, and the others may either comment or support it. They do not, however have the right to amend or modify the original text. These initiatives or proposals generally have no pre-defined format, nor sometimes even any precise purpose. They are a posteriori moderated and summarised by appointed professionals, with specific editor rights, whose role is to provide a synthesis of contributions to the organisation having commissioned the consultation. The proposals are ranked according to a system of positive supports (aka "likes" in a popular social network), where each member of the community has an infinite number of "likes" to distribute.
KuneAgi brings in a collective and deliberative dimension in the writing of texts. These are written by a Working Group that operates in an open and democratic way, taking into account the opinions and perspectives of all, in order to reach a superior, collective intelligence. This collective writing process is a fully automatic mode of quality filtering: only those proposals that are deemed interesting enough to mobilise a Working Group are led to their conclusion, published and submitted to the approval of other participants.
These proposals are strongly structured: what is the problem / the issue? why is it important? what solution do we propose to this problem / issue? what positive or negative changes does it bring, to whom? why is it superior to other competing solutions - and to the fact of doing nothing? This structure is oriented towards public policy. It helps the reflection of the Working Group, and also to convince political decision-makers.
In addition, in KuneAgi, each member of the community only has a finite number of Support Tokens, which s/he must manage parcimoniously. This finite character translates the fact that all human organisations only have finite resources, and that one of the collective is precisely to define its priorities (itself in finite numbers) for the allocation of the aforementioned resources.
Finally, all members have identical rights and obligations. None has any particular rights, because the system functions without even requesting an administrator or a moderator (this function is distributed among the participants).